Never See Us Again Sujan Ste
A vast circle is crammed with densely packed houses stacked on top of one another. Drawn in black ink, their edges merge equally they jostle in space.
The narrow strips between the houses accept fluid shadows, but in the center of this urban universe is a white hole. "That is a doughnut," says a visitor, at the Siddhartha Art Gallery where artist Sujan Dangol's meticulous line drawings are on display at the Tales of a City exhibition till the end of the month.
"I cannot impose my concepts or ideas on viewers, their interpretation is just as genuine and appropriate considering they view information technology subjectively as their own background, thoughts and feelings come into play," Dangol explains in his studio in Koteshwor. Calorie-free bounces off his round glasses as the twoscore-year-old artist'south gaze turns to the large window on his left.
The studio is an open space with sofas, bookstands and tables about. In one corner is a large painting — "A friend is working on that one," Dangol says — and metal and clay sculptures sit on various shelves. He is dressed in a long, brown corduroy shirt, and his manus hangs in a higher place a work in progress: some other large canvas, well-nigh filled to the brim with tiny houses and streets.
It is clear that the drawings depict the tremendous transformation that has turned Kathmandu Valley'due south rich urban-agro civilisation into a concrete jungle. Dangol's sketches represent dizzying, densely packed towns with teetering temples and dilapidated homes, almost like a drawing, or satire.
For Dangol, art is a three-indicate collaboration between an artist, the object and the viewers who be in the infinite between the abstract and the existent. The experience is incomplete fifty-fifty when simply 1 of the three is missing. The drawings feel at once familiar and strange — the sprawling urbanscape is part of our daily lives, just they have also acquired an almost metaphysical aspect.
A giant vajra, for case, looks equally though wrapped in a shawl of windows and roofs — and Dangol invites the viewers to make full in the gaps, recognise and rediscover their own stories.
Sujan Dangol grew upward in Mahabouddha nearly the Kathmandu Darbar Square when the historical towns of this emerald valley were still located forth ridges with the slopes down to the rivers below devoted to agriculture.
"I still remember the sights, sounds and smells of eating rice on the balcony during the minpachas holiday in winter," adds Dangol, lamenting that today none of the things he used to bask as a child are accessible or possible.
The concrete canopy of houses cake out the lord's day, at that place are no public open up spaces for children to run around in, in that location is the ever-present din of the city's perpetual motion automobile.
These feelings of loss and nostalgia permeate all of Dangol's exhibits. The artworks are rigorous and complex: each cityscape is meticulously fatigued in pen and ink, filled with stark emotional and intellectual intensity. He recreates history and compages in a visual linguistic communication that is uniquely his, built on the bedrock of his own memories and infused with elements of sociology.
Large Bell is a rendition of the i that stands in Patan Darbar Square, but its base is crammed with little houses and temples. Dark hills stretch behind, and at the anxiety of the monument are slabs that look like funeral ghat with blackness blobs spread well-nigh them.
It is an ominous piece, foreboding. The sun casts a shadow behind itself and, on closer look, the roofs are bare and take holes in them with wooden beams poking out. The bell itself looks weary, the roof above it is worn out, and it is almost like a deep sigh escapes this 38×48 inch-frame with an overwhelming sense of loss.
The other drawings evoke like pathos. Carved Malla-era windows stand up side by side to neoclassical doors, and somewhere in the heart are tall, flat and blank walls. But between them the galli is tranquillity and temple eaves have come up undone. The ever-watchful eyes on the stupas look anile and tired, maybe by the desolation they have witnessed.
With the touch of pen and ink, Dangol reinvents a visual vernacular of memory and loss. Merely Dangol does not want the messaging to be too direct or blatant. He says: "I am non a heavily conceptual creative person … if I start a slice with also much intention, it disrupts my workflow."
Proud of his Newa heritage, Dangol aspires to develop a new grammar for Nepali contemporary art that builds on the civilisation and skills that he grew up around and the relics of which are still present. There is no western influence hither: the styles are borrowed from gardeners, woodcarvers, tailors, masons and brick-layers, and likewise the struts, carved windows and exteriors of abased buildings.
"The cross-hatching in my drawings are inspired by my wife'due south harbinger mats," says Dangol. Miniature installations featuring harbinger mats and seeds by his married woman, Sharmila Shrestha are also on exhibit in Tales of a Urban center.
Sujan Dangol traces the origin of this series to 2012, when as his graduation installation he built a city of 1,500 cardboard boxes and cartons of various brand names in the Nepal Art Quango. The installation was complete with streets and roads that people could walk through and interact with. Architecture and heritage accept since heavily influenced his art and outlook.
"Information technology takes over 500 or 1,000 years to build and develop an urban civilisation, and nurture its language, heritage, civilization and cuisine," says Dangol. "Simply when I await at Kathmandu today, I am saddened by the changes in the final 20-30 years, and peculiarly following the 2015 convulsion. This is not normal. Development and progress should exist gradual, non disorganised."
Houses, says Dangol, are not just places of residence. The traditional brick, timber and tiles of the buildings with their carved wooden columns, windows and doors represent an invaluable legacy and expression of arts and crafts, history, experience and expectations that span generations.
"Individual houses are just every bit important as temples," he says. And a street of houses has a commonage ambient, so heritage conservation must look across simply monuments to these ordinary neighbourhoods and their sometime dwellings that are existence torn down to be replaced with physical."
The bahal, falcha and hiti are existence overrun with selfishness and greed, the accelerated consumerism and obsession with money do non value the history and heritage of Swoinga, Kathmandu Valley.
Being passionate near literature, art and compages, Dangol says depicting these changes in his drawings is an outlet for his aggravation with the accelerated and irreversible alter happening all around.
I peculiarly gloomy drawing is Kalki that depicts the deity, i of the x avatar of Vishnu, with fiery hair and wings, riding a leaping horse above a city equally contrails swirl behind him. Kalki looks straight at the viewer with a deeply unsettling expression on his face up — the rage in his eyes is shared past his horse which has a chain of skulls looping around his neck.
Kalki is associated with destruction, and is the prophesied incarnation of Vishnu at the end of the electric current Kali Yug wheel of being in Hindu cosmology. The destruction is followed by Satya Yug, when the anarchy and darkness finish.
This is an important metaphor in Dangol's drawing: destruction looming over a city, heritage on the verge of extinction. But, at the same time, Kalki is likewise the harbinger of cleansing and renewal.
The exhibition 'Tale of a City' is open until 29 November at Siddhartha Art Gallery, Baber Mahal Revisted, Kathmandu.
Read also:
Whose heritage is it anyhow? , Marit Bakke
A time to every purpose , Sahina Shrestha
Restoring a piece of Nepal'due south history , Sahina Shrestha
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Source: https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/between-the-lines-with-sujan-dangol/
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